Gates Foundation gives $100K to Seattle news site

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has donated $100,000 to the newly-turned-nonprofit Seattle news site Crosscut, its publisher announced Wednesday.

“This key lead gift, along with $50,000 of funding from generous individuals, is meant to launch Crosscut’s new mission of providing online local journalism in the public interest, and to build Crosscut’s capacity and sustainability,” Publisher David Brewster wrote.

This week, Crosscut officially completed its transition from a for-profit company to a nonprofit news organization, aiming for a revenue model that more closely resembles public radio. Crosscut on Wednesday launched its first membership drive since the site started publishing in April 2007.

Brewster

“In the summer of 2008, I began to suspect that an advertising-only model for revenue was not going to support high-quality journalism. The migration of advertising to the Web had slowed and the rates were staying low,” Brewster wrote. “Another factor during the past year has been the very unsettled media landscape, particularly after the (Seattle) Post-Intelligencer stopped its print edition and many journalists were cut adrift by layoffs at other.”